The present invention relates generally to technical hands-on maintenance training apparatus and systems, and more particularly, to apparatus for simulating hardware failures in a piece of equipment having a VME architecture that supports system and subsystem troubleshooting.
Heretofore, the only available technique of providing fault insertion for equipment having a VME bus architecture, was to design and implement a pre-faulted module. A pre-faulted module is an actual circuit card that is electrically altered in order to provide a controlled set of fault symptoms. In a training lab environment, to insert a fault into the equipment, a training instructor would power down the equipment that is to be tested, excuse students from the training lab, insert the pre-faulted module into the equipment, power up the equipment, and call the students back into the lab.
Disadvantages of using the pre-faulted modules include the need to alter or modify an actual VME circuit card, which may cost on the order of the tens of thousands of dollars, lost training time during installation of the pre-faulted module, and each pre-faulted module only simulates one failure.
The assignee of the present invention provides customer training and logistics management support to military customers that purchase its weapon and control systems, for example. An existing product developed by the assignee of the present invention known as an HFC-198 fault insertion device is used to fault test these weapon and control systems. However, the HFC-198 fault insertion device can only be deployed in equipment dedicated to maintenance training because its installation requires modification of backplane wiring of the tested equipment. Therefore, the HFC-198 fault insertion device cannot be installed in equipment that is designated for tactical or operational missions.
Accordingly, it is an objective of the present invention to provide for apparatus that simulates hardware failures in a piece of equipment having a VME architecture, and which does not require modification of VME circuit cards or backplane, simulates many types of failures, and is relatively cost effective.